Gray Lodge No. 329, A. F. & A. M.

Gray, born in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1787, was a militia captain in the War of 1812 and a lieutenant colonel from 1821, and was known as Colonel Gray for the rest of his life. At Washington-on-the-Brazos he tried and failed to become the convention's secretary, but the diary he kept, published in 1909 as From Virginia to Texas, 1835, records its proceedings in some cases more fully than the official journal. He was later district attorney and clerk of the Texas Supreme Court, and secretary of the Philosophical Society of Texas. He died in Houston in April 1841.

What the plaque says

Gray Lodge No. 329, A. F. & A. M. Founded in 1870, this is Houston's second oldest Masonic Lodge. On May 11, 1870, twenty-two Master Masons, in response to the growth in Houston's population, signed a petition requesting a charter for a new lodge from the Grand Lodge of Texas. Gray Lodge No. 329 was constituted in the hall of Houston's first Masonic Lodge, Holland Lodge No. 1. The lodge was named for William Fairfax Gray, who was in Texas as a land agent and attended the Convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos in 1836 when Texas declared independence from Mexico. Gray moved his family from Virginia to Houston in 1837. He was by profession an attorney, and served as clerk of the Republic of Texas House of Representatives and the Senate in 1837 and 1838. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 15 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 15 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 15 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 16 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• _H7 Ranch — 3.5 mi
• Dairy (Alief) — 3.8 mi
• Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery — 5.3 mi
• Hodge's Bend Cemetery — 6.8 mi